David Harding
dgaharding@hotmail.com
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Introduction
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About Public Art Index
  View Public Art Index
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5-YEAR DRIVE-BY
Douglas Gordon in 29 Palms.
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MEANWHILE ARTIST
Recalling the work of Jamie McCullough.
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THE SCOTIA NOSTRA
Socialisation and Glasgow artists
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PUBLIC ART IN THE BRITISH NEW TOWNS
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• MEMORIES AND VAGARIES
The development of social art practices in Scotland.
 • Community Art
 • The artist in town planning and urban design
 • Other developments in Scotland
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MACLOVIO ROJAS
Social sculpture in Tijuana.
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Public Art - Contentious Term and Contested Practice
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Art and Social Context
Contextual art practice in education.
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VENICE VERNISSAGE - 2003
A visit to the biennale.
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MULTI-STORY
Art and asylum seekers.
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CULTURAL DEMOCRACY Ð CRAIGMILLAR STYLE
30 years of the arts in an Edinburgh housing estate.
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A SEA WITHOUT BOATS*
A visit to Havana 2005.
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GLENROTHES TOWN ARTIST 1968-78*
Chapter 6 of memoir.
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PASSAGES*
a suicide, a monument, a film
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Community Art

It is interesting to note that Graham Stevens uses the term 'community art' in his article of 1989 since the term has been one of the most contentious issues at the very core of the social concerns of these changing art practices. Despite attempts to dispense with it, it remains the term with the most common currency, taken up now in the USA. In July '94 The Guardian carried an article on Richard Hoggart which states, "He was tolerant of the claims made for 'community art'." New terms have been coined like, 'developmental art,' which reflect the uncertainty which pervaded this area of art practice from the outset. It is the term, community art, which makes the art establishment fulminate about condescension and the lowering of standards. Yet it was the arch enemy of both APG and community art, Sir Roy Shaw, Secretary General of ACGB, who, in his Annual Report for the year 1976/77, defined community art at its simplest as, "the activity of artists in various art forms, working in a particular community and involving the participation of members of that community." Shaw nevertheless saw the activity as a means of eventually drawing the general population into an appreciation and enjoyment of the 'great tradition,' in other words the democratisation of the received and established culture. Shaw was taken to task on this issue by Owen Kelly writing in the magazine Arts Express in 1985. Under the title, "In Search of Cultural Democracy," Kelly writes, "To be in favour of cultural democracy then is not, as Roy Shaw seems to fear, to be opposed to opera, or ballet, or any other of the 'great arts', for they are creative acts as honourable as any other. It is merely to be implacably opposed to the present structure of grant aid and sponsorship which privileges them on an 'a priori' basis against countless other forms of human creativity which are marginalised or disregarded." He goes on, "for our concern is not with producing 'the right art' but rather with producing the right conditions within which communities can have their own creative voices recognised and given sufficient space to flourish." Hoggart was, like Shaw, all for widening access to the arts but was less keen on their deconstruction.

Art and local community action

Cultural democracy however was already being put into action despite the prevailing opposition to it. At the time that APG was being set up, a cultural revolution of a different sort had already begun in a setting far removed from the rarefied climate of the London art scene. On the Craigmillar housing estate in Edinburgh a Festival Society was formed. Mary Bowie, along with the legendary Helen Crummy, organised the first Craigmillar Festival of Music, Art and Drama. Craigmillar is an inter-wars housing estate which, even as early as 1934, was already being described as "ugly factory blocks" and "an abortion". It quickly became a disaster lacking social, educational and employment opportunities and breeding poverty and notoriety. With 25,000 inhabitants in the Sixties it was one of Edinburgh's running sores and typical of so many similar estates throughout the UK. In 1968 it led the city in attempted suicides, juvenile delinquency, children in care, overcrowding and tuberculosis. What happened in Craigmillar was unique in the field of local community cultural action since the Festival was founded and controlled by local people and continues to be so today. The founders wanted the arts to play a major role in the life of their community and, since Edinburgh's world famous International Festival rarely, if ever, touched them, they decided to have one of their own. The annual Festival became the focus for the Festival Society and was centred on a piece of political theatre conceived and written by local people. It was performed by a cast of local and professional actors. The Festival Society used the arts to become a political force, in time exerting some control over planning, building, social and cultural development of the estate. In 1975 it won £750,000, paid over five years, from the EC to strengthen and broaden its activities and, at its high point, was responsible for organising and running 57 social and cultural neighbourhood projects. Over the years the Festival Society created many opportunities for the arts to flourish selecting and employing artists, founding an arts centre and setting up Community Art Teams. In 1978 it produced a major report with 400 recommendations on how to improve life on the estate. The title of the report, The Gentle Giant, was named after the land sculpture of Gulliver conceived by Jimmy Boyle while still a prisoner in Barlinnie Prison in Glasgow. A team of local people under the direction of the artist Ken Wolverton and local carpenter John Locke undertook the construction. It was dedicated and 'unveiled' by Billy Connolly in 1976. A comprehensive environmental improvement project was carried out which included murals and play sculptures. With a certain cocky, native flair the Community Art Team, under the direction of Rosie Gibson, invited New York artist Pedro Silva, well known for his Gaudiesque benches around General Grant's Tomb on the Upper Westside of Manhattan, to design and build with local people a mosaic sculpture 60' long and 20' high. Its location was, strategically, on the line of a proposed road development which was opposed by the people of the area. Professional artists, in all art forms, were employed to work alongside local people but crucially on terms laid down by the Festival Society. This reversal of normal practice is all the more significant since it predates the surge of professional artists into housing estates and neighbourhoods to direct community art from the top. It also predates Augusta Boal; Brazilian founder of the Paris based Theatre of the Oppressed, who famously stated, 'never to go into a community until that community has articulated its need for you.'

Craigmillar served as a model for another 'notorious' housing estate in Scotland, Easterhouse in Glasgow, to set up its own Festival Society. As with Craigmillar, it was run and controlled locally and gained enormous success with its theatre productions, winning a Fringe Award at the Edinburgh Festival in 1981. It commissioned six artists to work with local people to design and execute a 200' long wall mosaic. As the work progressed on this prodigious task the mosaic became, of necessity, more the work of the artists. It contains decorative as well as highly political imagery and is known as the Easterhouse Mosaic. When I was visiting Chicago in 1984 I was asked by some artists if I had seen the Easterhouse Mosaic and did I have slides of it? Easterhouse to many people in Scotland meant crime, vandalism and poverty while in Chicago they had only heard of its art.

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David Harding 2005 [Link to Pixelville. Services include design, photography, multimedia and Internet applications, website  development and maintenance.]
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